The world outside the library ceased to exist. Hermione's life narrowed to the grey-bound folio, a pot of ink, and the treacherous landscape of her own heart. It was exhausting, harrowing work. Each symbol demanded a toll, a specific memory of loss meticulously recalled and felt anew.
She traced a swirling, downward coil while remembering the petrification of Mrs. Norris, that first, chilling taste of true fear at Hogwarts. A dull grey light pulsed from the page. She drew a sharp, jagged line, focusing on the heart-sinking horror of discovering Barty Crouch Jr.'s true identity. A flicker of dark silver.
It was a brutal archaeology of her own pain. She unearthed the grief for Dobby, a small, brave house-elf buried in a rocky grave. She revisited the devastating emptiness of erasing her parents' memories, a loss that still echoed in the quiet of her flat. With each memory, the book responded, the symbols glowing with a light that seemed to absorb her sorrow, acknowledging it, sharing its weight.
She wasn't reading words. She was feeling echoes. The book was a repository, and she was slowly, painfully, tuning herself to its frequency.
After a week of this emotional self-flagellation, a pattern began to emerge. The symbols weren't random. They were a narrative. The swirling coils represented confusion, the onset of loss. The jagged lines were the sharp, immediate pain. There were softer, fading marks that felt like resignation, and heavy, block-like shapes that radiated a permanent, unchanging despair.
She was mapping the anatomy of grief.
One evening, bleary-eyed and emotionally raw, she came across a sequence that was different. It was a series of interlocking circles, not sharp or sorrowful, but… resolved. They glowed with a soft, warm gold when she poured her feeling into them, a feeling not of joy, but of acceptance. A love that had made peace with its own absence.
This was it. The heart of the book. The lesson it was trying to teach.
It wasn't a chronicle of a single person's sorrow. It was a guide. A magical treatise on how to transform raging, chaotic grief into something still and sacred. A memorial. A Vault.
The realization struck her with the force of a physical blow. She pushed back from the table, her chair scraping loudly in the silent library.
This book and the Vault were connected. They weren't just similar; they were part of the same magical tradition. The Vault was the practical application—a massive, physical manifestation of the very process described in this folio. The book was the theory.
Cassian must have known. He'd felt the connection immediately. This was why he'd been so captivated. He hadn't just found a sad book; he'd found the instruction manual for the very phenomenon they were studying.
And now he was gone, taking this crucial piece of the puzzle with him. Or rather, she had driven him away while he held the key in his hands.
A new, more urgent purpose ignited within her. She had to talk to him. She had to show him what she'd discovered. She had to apologize, not just for her words, but for her blindness. He had been leagues ahead of her, seeing the connection she was only now grasping.
But how? The Department of Mysteries had declared him unreachable.
An idea, wild and desperate, began to form. The book responded to shared sorrow. It was a conduit for empathic magic. What if it could be more? What if it could be a bridge?
She looked down at the page with the interlocking golden circles—the symbol of resolved grief, of love enduring beyond loss. That was the feeling she needed. Not the sharp pain of his absence, but the steady, unwavering certainty of what he meant to her. The complicated, frustrating, brilliant mess of him that had become essential.
She placed her hand flat on the page, over the golden symbols. She closed her eyes, shutting out the library, the world, everything. She didn't think of the fight. She thought of his smile in the Leaky Cauldron. The weight of his hand on hers in the dark. The way his mind challenged and expanded her own. She focused on the simple, terrifying truth: she missed him. Not the project, not the intellectual stimulation. Him.
She poured that feeling—not a desperate plea, but a clear, strong signal of connection—into the page. She imagined it not as a sad whisper, but as a beacon.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, a warmth spread from the page under her palm, a gentle, golden heat that travelled up her arm and settled in her chest. The symbols under her hand blazed, not with silver sorrow, but with brilliant, sunny gold.
A single, clear thought, not her own, echoed in the quiet of her mind. It was faint, like a voice from a great distance, but laced with unmistakable shock.
…Hermione?
The connection lasted for less than a second before snapping, leaving her gasping in the sudden silence, the golden light fading from the page.
But it had been enough.
He had heard her.
He was out there, somewhere. And for a fleeting moment, across whatever magical distance separated them, he had listened.
She had found her way to speak to him. Now, she had to hope he would find his way to answer.